Ready Made Product Development, by Peter Swann

The financial year is drawing to a close and it’s time to look back and see what we have achieved and look forward and make new plans.  I don’t have all the figures yet, more of that next month, but it has certainly been our best year yet for sales of ready-made products (as they are now officially known!).  The merger of our distributor, QED, with Inclusive Technology seems to have been an important factor in our sales growth.  They are simply a much bigger company with an enormous client base.

Workshop Team has been a huge success, but I won’t go on about it here, except to say a big thank you to all concerned.  I have written a thorough review of its activities which will be in our April Friends Update.

March has been at least as busy as February but as it comes to an end I sense a slight easing of the pressure.  The end-of-year sales bulge seems to have been well managed by Inclusive who successfully spread it out over a couple of months.  We’ve had quite a good throughput of direct sales as well, though, culminating in a Bugzi for Richard Cloudesley School which was delivered this week.  They were also responsible for purchasing our first Groovz (new arm guide product) and Grabzi (grab handle).  That’s the power of the product demo! Tom, ever resourceful, managed to find time for yet another Flexzi invention (see photo. Launch date 1st April 2012 before midday :-)) 

Also keeping us busy throughout March has been the new website, now officially launched.  An immense amount of work has gone into this, leading to much anguish and tearing out of hair, but the result is superb and really shows MERU off at its best. The shop bit will be ready in a couple of weeks – it’s the most complicated part from a programming point of view.  It will showcase a number of new products and make them much, much easier to buy.

And finally, of course, by the time you read this we will officially be a part of the QEF family of charities. http://www.qef.org.uk/  Without QEF we would no longer be here.  Yes, really, it came that close.  We are delighted to be under their umbrella now and look forward to an era of greater stability and access to new resources.  MERU ready-mades are all set to go from strength to strength!